April 21, 2025
A significant part of managing content for websites, web services, and web applications revolves around identity. When working with a CMS, you may have numerous people accessing different pages and services, all at the same time. Now that more users are remote, this could pose some challenges.
Note: this blog is the fourth in a series.
Recently, Dimensional Research released a report stating that 59 percent said that data protection was their biggest concern about their organization using IAM. Only 15 percent said they were completely confident their organization would not be hacked due to their access control system. Security professionals are concerned about integrating IAM with legacy systems (50 percent), moving to the cloud (44 percent), and employees using unapproved technology (43 percent).
Updating a header image on a website is one thing, but ensuring proper access to various parts of an advanced website or web service CMS can be quite different. Identity federation and access management is a system of trust. This trust is between two parties to authenticate a user (or service) and convey the information needed to access that specific resource. A good identity federation and access platform will enforce common identity security standards and protocols. The system will coordinate and manage users' digital identities between different identity providers, websites, web services, applications, and portals, and more across your infrastructure. Remember, this controlled access is done internally or externally. And, it's entirely based on intelligent context. That is:
- Who are you?
- Where are you coming in from?
- Should you have access to this content?
- Why are you accessing this content?
- What are you trying to do?
Federated Identity is Not the Same as SSO
It's important to note that identity federation and access management are not single sign-on (SSO). To clarify, federation services will, in most cases, automatically provide you with single sign-on capabilities. However, simply having single sign-on tools does not automatically give your enterprise federation or broader access or identity management. More broadly speaking, federation services allow for a much wider reach as they can span numerous security domains and multiple applications.
When working with CMS, federated identity and trust are established through a digital signature and encryption. A good federation system can do this via multiple protocols, including SAML 1 or 2, WS-Federation, or OAuth2.
Where content is king, you need to understand who has the keys to your kingdom. Our next blog in the series dives into how identity federation and CMS must work together.
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